But protesters insisted it was just a matter of time before the police killed again.
On October 8, eighteen-year-old Vonderrit D. Myers was shot multiple times by an off-duty officer in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis—a racially diverse, middle-class section of the city. Police said Myers, who fired three shots at an officer, was armed with a stolen gun that they recovered at the scene. Family members insisted at the time that he was armed only with a deli sandwich.
“Racial profiling will not stand in our community any longer,” declared Pastor Doug Hollis, a cousin of Myers, as he presided over a candlelight memorial at the spot where the man, known in the community by the nickname Drup, was killed. More than a hundred clutched rosaries and candles and chanted, “Whose street? Drup’s street,” as they released red and silver balloons into the air. “We pray for every young man in this community, dear God,” another local minister proclaimed during a prayer a few moments later. “That he might be safe wherever he walks.”
The shooting came as hundreds were flocking to Ferguson for Ferguson October, a planned weekend of activism that had been coordinated both locally and nationally. The brunt of the work fell to the Organization for Black Struggle and MORE, as well as the new groups, such as Hands Up United and Millennial Activists United. Ferguson October was designed to show local officials that activists had not forgotten about their pursuit of justice for Michael Brown. Given the intense national coverage of the case, I was shocked that the investigation had been allowed to linger this long. Late summer was now fall, with winter fast approaching.
The weekend included carefully coordinated acts of civil disobedience, but no rioting or violence. Hundreds marched on and occupied Saint Louis University; ministers Jim Wallis and Cornel West led dozens of clergy onto the property of the Ferguson Police Department and were arrested; and young activists like DeRay Mckesson, an educator who had joined the protests from Minneapolis, and Charles Wade, a former fashion designer from Austin, helped plan roadblocks of downtown intersections that they called They Think It’s a Game—during which the activists played children’s games such as hopscotch and jump rope as they blocked traffic.
I’d initially been skeptical of Ferguson October. The initial protests had gone on for weeks, and it was hard to believe that these activists, many of whom had never organized demonstrations or direct action protests before, would be able to replicate the organic emotion that radiated from the crowded streets during August. But the Myers shooting had sparked a new sense of urgency. Myers’s name was now being chanted along with those of Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell. While it would take months to sort out a full official version of what had happened, much of St. Louis’s black community already knew everything they needed to know: another black young man had been killed by another white police officer.
A dreadful anticipation had for months hung thick in the air. The grand jury waiting game had stretched for months, and even those of us among the press who had stayed in Ferguson for weeks eventually departed. By early November, with rumors of an impending decision, the media, myself included, had started showing up again. Each day was another countdown toward the inevitable: Darren Wilson was not going to be charged with a crime for the shooting, the city would likely break out into another round of chaos, and it all would be covered wall to wall on cable television.
Netta Elzie, and many other activists who had been anointed leaders of the protests by the national media, had grown noticeably weary of all of the anticipatory coverage. Almost every night there was some sort of demonstration, often either outside the Ferguson Police Department or in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis where Meyers had been killed, and it wasn’t uncommon to find the most recognizable and best known of the local organizers screaming at the horde of media cameras to move back so actual protesters could take spots closest to the police line. At one point, Netta and several other prominent protesters decided to sit out the ongoing preannouncement protests, arguing that it wasn’t worth it to spend their nights outside in the cold on evenings when cameras outnumbered protest signs. Meanwhile, they kept getting calls from reporters like me, who to their frustration continued to ask the same slew of questions: “What’s going to happen if there is no indictment? Are you worried about violence?” “We just had coffee with like thirty-four reporters,” Netta told me one afternoon in November, about a week and a half before the grand jury decision would be announced, as the full force of the national media began rearriving on the ground. “There are a few reporters who I’ll read their stories and just…,” she said, trailing off. “All it takes is one bad reporter or one reporter who just constantly works to make the police look better to make me leery of talking to all of the reporters from that same newspaper or station.”
And, as is often the case with competitive stories, media saturation bred frustration and at times unhealthy competition between reporters on the ground. Both local and national media had taken turns getting things wrong, parroting police and protester narratives that were later disproven and drawing the ire of readers, and each other. The national media, many local scribes quibbled, was out of touch with local context and just wanted to make itself the story. And the local media, some of the national reporters contended, was often too cozy with the police and prosecutor and was complicit in most of the deep systemic problems now exposed in the wake of the shooting.
Everyone was right, to an extent. But in reality, reporters were only lashing out at each other because we were all exhausted. It had been three months of unanswered questions, tense overnight reporting assignments, editors demanding answers that we could not provide, and, at all times, the anxiety of knowing that no matter how late into the night the protests went on we would all have to wake up the next day and do it all over again.
That anger toward the national media, particularly cable news networks, peaked in mid-November following a string of erroneous reports declaring that an announcement of the grand jury decision was imminent, only to be walked back hours or days later.
“Reporters from the large cities, the economic and the political centers, they tend to believe that they are the biggest dogs of all the big dogs, and they tend to be slow to admit that local media has better official sources,” Chris King, the managing editor of the St. Louis American, the local black weekly newspaper, told me one day in November. King spent the months between Mike Brown’s death and the grand jury announcement serving as a source and fixer for national media reporters parachuting into town. His information wasn’t always right, but he was regularly in contact with police and city officials who were often reluctant to talk with the national press, certainly not on the record. A text message introduction from King could instantly set an out-of-town reporter up with an excellent source.
“It’s the ‘broadcast media that cried wolf’ crisis,” King told me, exasperated by yet another erroneous cable news report that had declared a grand jury decision had been reached. “If cable news said tomorrow morning that the sun is risen, people would walk outside to see if the sun is outside.”
On one afternoon I showed up on West Florissant Avenue for an interview with Mike Brown’s barber and found more television cameras than shoppers at a strip mall up the street from the shooting site. An Internet rumor had declared that this was the day of the announcement, causing the number of out-of-town reporters to spike.
“Can one of you-all call and find out about the power?” shouted Lawanda Felder, a twenty-year-old college student, who lives in a nearby apartment building, to the reporters. The power had gone out on one side of West Florissant, affecting hundreds of low-income housing units, so Felder came outside to ask the long line of reporters conducting interviews if they knew what was up. No one did, although I don’t know that any of us had really inquired.
“They’re just out here to see if there will be riots,” Felder told me, encapsulating the chief complaint of many Ferguson residents about the ongoing anticipatory coverage. “But they don’t care ab
out the struggles we’re facing in our daily lives. None of them are going to call and see why my power is out.”
When the news finally broke, we were crowded in the hotel suite that the half dozen or so Washington Post staffers on the ground in Ferguson were using as a makeshift newsroom. It was a one-line alert from Bloomberg News that came just after 11:30 a.m. on a weekday just before Thanksgiving.
“BREAKING: The Ferguson grand jury considering charges against Darren Wilson has concluded its work.”
The alert was a relief, because I was ready for it all to be over: the false reports that the decision was imminent, the rumors peddled by conservative news outlets that black separatist groups were going to show up with assault rifles, the declarations of liberal blogs that the KKK was going to be in Ferguson protecting businesses and targeting protesters. Each new report would prompt a wave of emails from my bosses back in DC—Do we have this confirmed? Can we get this interview, too? How can we push this forward? Even mainstream outlets like the Post and CNN got into the game of fruitless predictions triggered by sourcing veiled in anonymity. In October, several colleagues and I reported that Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson’s resignation was imminent. We were wrong.
The consensus among the hundreds if not thousands of reporters on the ground was that, most likely, the decision not to indict would thrust the city back into chaos. There was intense pressure to pinpoint when exactly the news might be coming. Misinformed sourcing was abundant. Local attorneys who claimed to be close to prosecutor Bob McCulloch, federal law enforcement officials who claimed to have a real-time handle on the developments in Missouri despite being seated comfortably at their desks in Washington, DC, and local Congressional offices were all leaking tidbits of information to reporters at local and national outlets—more often spreading information that would prove untrue. But Bloomberg, a financial news outlet, had yet to be wrong. Frankly, the fact that they were the outlet breaking the news that the grand jury had concluded its work led me to believe their sourcing was solid. I texted a source of mine I had been cultivating for weeks to see if I could confirm it.
Ferguson police and city government were hopeless in terms of issuing accurate information. Other than the occasional interview or puff profile, almost no one working for Ferguson PD actually knew anything about the daily developments in the Mike Brown case, and those who did weren’t talking. My best bet, I’d figured pretty early on in my reporting, was tracking down someone in the county government. The county’s elected officials and police would certainly be involved in conversations about how to roll out the announcement, meaning their staffs would all be briefed. And I figured I could charm at least one of those staffers into sharing some of that information with me. So I sent a text message: Is the grand jury concluded? Is an announcement coming today?
“The gj was [sic] finished its work and discussion of how and when announcement will be made,” the source replied.
And then my phone started ringing. The source was calling. The principals—prosecutor McCulloch, county police chief Jon Belmar, the county executive, and their aides—were stepping into a meeting to decide what to do. They had given consideration to a plan that would have them announce only that the grand jury had finished its process and announce a later date when the decision itself would be released. But the police unions hated that plan. Their officers were working twelve-hour shifts, and Thanksgiving was fast approaching. If the city was going to burn, they argued, they might as well get it over with before the holiday.
When news is breaking, the uncertainty and urgency spark the drive to make the calls and pester the sources needed to confirm details, but also sprout a mentally overwhelming anxiety—a pressure to get it right, and to get it first. Mostly, I hope, to get it right.
I frantically paced our hotel suite, sitting down and then abruptly shooting back up to my feet perhaps a hundred times that afternoon as we worked to confirm that the grand jury decision was coming. At 1:49 p.m., almost two hours after the grand jury had ended its session, my source texted me again. The meeting had just concluded, and a final decision had been made.
“McCulloch set to announce the GJ decision at 7pm. That could change,” the source said. “Gov has a press event at 5:30 ahead of the announcement.”
It all made sense. Governor Nixon would take to the microphones before the announcement to preemptively urge peace. Then, that evening, with schoolchildren safely home, parents home from work, and their teens hopefully home and under their watchful eyes, the prosecutor would break the news.
I shot a text message to a second, well-connected local source. This one wasn’t quite as well placed as my first contact, but over the course of the months since Ferguson had become a national story, this person had yet to steer me wrong. A response came quickly: the decision was made, and it was coming tonight.
Meanwhile, my colleague Kimberly Kindy, whose diligence and deep sourcing had helped our Ferguson coverage avoid disaster more than once, had her own source confirming what I was hearing. We had three people—the magic number—all telling us the decision had been made and was coming that night (one of mine even went so far as to say that the grand jury had decided against an indictment). But we chose to hold back. As cable networks spent hours declaring that an announcement of the decision “could come at any moment,” we wrote that the decision was expected that evening. We decided early on that we wouldn’t attempt to scoop the decision itself. We would wait for the words to come out of Bob McCulloch’s mouth.
The rest of the day was a blur. We knew we’d have tight newspaper deadlines, made tighter by the decision to announce whether Wilson would be charged that night. And we knew that—one way or another—the streets would erupt.
My plan had been to spend the night at the Canfield Green apartment complex, to wait and see if the neighborhood where Mike Brown lived would descend into violence. But as I sat in the car charging my phone, I got a text message from DeRay Mckesson. He wanted to know where I’d be watching the decision and invited me to a friend’s apartment about ten miles away in downtown St. Louis to watch the announcement with him, Netta, and a handful of other activists.
The group I found in the living room of a third-floor downtown apartment building was calm, like a suburban family gathered around the television for the evening news. Netta and DeRay had been at the forefront of the protests, and they were joined by a few others who had also been there from the very beginning. In total there were eight of us gathered around the small television set. Initially we had settled on watching Headline News, but after a while they tired of the tone of the questions being asked by Nancy Grace. Eventually, they switched the channel to CNN. The announcement wouldn’t come for more than an hour. But they already knew. As prosecutor Bob McCulloch began speaking, Mckesson let out a loud sigh.
“Here we go,” said Brittany Packnett, then executive director of Teach for America—St. Louis, who had been actively involved in the protests and had quickly become close with Netta and DeRay. “Here we go.”
Sent each day by either Netta, DeRay, Brittany, or Justin Hansford, a law professor at St. Louis University, the Ferguson Protester Newsletter had swelled to a readership of more than twenty-one thousand people. And the newsletter’s writers had become masters of the text message alert system they’d crafted during Ferguson October. The news had yet to break, but they were ready. In anticipation of Wilson’s not being charged, they had prepared an open letter, written primarily by Packnett, that they planned to blast out to their subscribers the moment McCulloch made his announcement.
“In Ferguson, a wound bleeds,” the letter said. “The results are in. And we still don’t have justice.”
Wilson had not been indicted. They hit “Send” on the letter; I fired off several tweets and then asked each of the activists in the room for their reaction to the news. When I was done typing up a feed for my editors back in Washington, everyone in the room sprinted toward the apartment door to make the drive back to Ferg
uson.
Several miles away, hundreds gathered outside the Ferguson Police Department, some carrying the protest signs that had been held there every day since the one when Mike Brown was killed.
“Everybody want me to be calm, do you know how those bullets hit my son? What they did to his body as they entered his body?!” Lezley McSpadden screamed as the news was relayed, her husband and other loved ones wrapping her in a tight hug. “Burn this motherfucker down!” her husband, Louis Head, began screaming. “Burn this bitch down.”
There were fires in the streets before DeRay, Netta, and Brittany even made it to Ferguson. By morning, dozens of businesses had been torched, Ferguson police cruisers pummeled, and above it all were the festive streetlights city officials had hung, spelling out SEASON’S GREETINGS.
CHAPTER TWO
Cleveland: Coming Home
It wasn’t long after the grand jury decision in Ferguson that most of the media that had flocked to Greater St. Louis boarded planes back home. As the rest of my colleagues headed home to their families for the Thanksgiving holiday, I stayed in my hotel room to cover what remained after the riots, namely the cleanup. Dozens of properties—a Chinese food place that had been gutted, a small cupcake bakery whose equipment had been torched, a used-car lot in which every vehicle had been ignited and left to smolder—had been burned on the night of the grand jury decision.
On West Florissant, the building that had housed Heal STL, a nonprofit started by St. Louis alderman Antonio French during the months between the shooting and the nonindictment, had been burned to the ground, leaving behind a pile of ash and brick. Across town, far from the protest sites, the church where Michael Brown’s father had been baptized had also been set ablaze.
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